Ep. 133 Champions of innovation instead of captives of compliance?
Release Date: 02/27/2024
Ep. 152 Insights on Managing Federal Data
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
We are in a whirlwind of change. Data is pouring into federal agencies. A recent report indicated that data was growing at 25% a year; cloud usage at a rate of 61%; and Software as A Service an astounding 200%. Oh, did I forget to mention that Generative AI is also increasing data exploding? It is one thing to worry about data from John’s Doughnuts, and quite another to worry about sensitive military, financial, and health information that the federal government is charged to protect. Data. gov estimates that 250 million data sets are being used by the public sector. This increase in data...
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Ep. 151 AI and Software Development
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
Sometimes, the most important impact of technology can be behind the curtains. Today, we will not focus on AI Deep Fakes and AI language translation, but on the impact AI on software development. Terry Miller from Karsun begins the interview with the basics of software development: collecting user stories. Traditionally, a systems analyst would interview several users to see how a software system should behave. This time-consuming process can be assisted with AI helping in assembling the details. Please note, Terry Miller will argue that AI is used as an auxiliary to humans putting together...
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Ep. 150 AI: Can it provide a safe path for federal technology?
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
Ep. 150 Can a platform provide a path to safe AI for federal technology? About every reader knows that ServiceNow is a large company that helps the federal government with managing large systems. Today, Dr. Raj Iyer answers the question – is ServiceNow keeping up with AI to help reduce cost and improve delivery for massive federal systems? Dr. Iyer is in a unique position because of his years of experience in commercial systems and a recent stint as the CIO of the United States Army. An argument can be made that he is up to date with managing large systems and has a thorough understanding of...
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Ep. 149 Artificial Intelligence & human intelligence to win proposals.
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
Everyone has seen AI with articles and even deep fake videos. No doubt it is dazzling, great for a conversation at a picnic with friends. The question is . . . can you put AI in work boots? Vishwas Lele has a novel idea: combine the best of AI with the best of proposal writing. Further, his innovation can be applied to an environment where data must be held securely. Yes, we are talking about proposals for the federal intelligence community. Vishwas describes the Microsoft approach to AI – differentiates between free and paid Chat GPT as well as the free and paid versions of CoPilot....
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Ep. 148 Deep Intelligence and Critical Visibility
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
Federal technology has paralleled the commercial world in its expansion to millions of endpoints. On one hand, this means better information from something like an intrusion sensor. On the other hand, it means the attack surface has just expanded exponentially. It has come to a point where there has been a normalization of breaches. Unfortunately, this does not mean one can neglect protecting your agency from external threats. ZeroFox specializes in understanding external threat security. They have been around since 2013 and “Zero” in on protecting apps, data, people, domains, and API’s....
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Ep. 147 Tech Communities how to build and sustain
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
After hundreds of interviews with tech innovators I have concluded they are all trying to accomplish the same thing: tell how they can help get the word out that they may have a slice of the solution for federal information technology. One of the best ways to “get the word out” is through a community of interest. During the interview today, Derek Weeks details his success in forming a community around Development Operations, or DevOps. In fact, he has published a book detailing that wildly successful endeavor: Unfair Mindshare LINK One of the keys is to listen to problems and...
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Ep. 146 Tactical Edge Network
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
The federal government has a myriad of technological challenges: legacy systems, Zero Trust, and even maintaining existing equipment! Most companies who work in that environment solve problems from a traditional office, or, even more comfortably, a home office. Unfortunately, life at the tactical edge is not that easy. Today, we dive into the tactical edge network with Sumner Lee, the CEO of a company called Fuse Integration. He started his career at the U.S. Naval Academy and has served in a variety of different geographical environments. As a result, he has an appreciation for warfighters...
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Ep. 145 DDOS Attacks & Federal Agencies
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
Cybersecurity threats are like fashion; wait a few years and they come back in style. The Internet was designed to take a series of digits and resolve them to a website address. This was deemed the Domain Name Service, or DNS. In 1996, we saw the first malicious actor flooding a system with an attack. This was called a Distributed Denial of Service Attack, or DDOS. Over the years new methods of attack have proliferated and DDOS has taken a back seat. However, the number of endpoints has risen exponentially. It certainly looks like we are in a perfect storm to revive good old-fashioned DDOS....
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Ep. 144 Process automation and no code platforms Appian
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
Appian Corporation is a 25-year-old technology company that focuses on improving process automation for large organizations. Once a year they have an annual conference for developers and partners. They rotate this meeting all over the world, we are lucky enough to have them meet in Washington DC where we have the chance to sit down with one of Appian’s co-founders, Michael Beckley. During the interview Michael Beckley covered topics like the impact of artificial intelligence on process automation; process automation and acquisition professionals; and how to improve process automation. Appian...
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Ep. 143 Selling to the feds (Bonus episode) Breaking into the federal technology marketplace.
Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness
In connecting with some new listeners, I learned that some have never sold to the federal government and listened to the podcast to see how other companies manage to work with federal agencies in reaching agency goals. Well, it seems time to pull back with a bonus episode on how to sell technology to the federal government. To accomplish this task, I looked for a person with twenty years of experience in public sector marketing. The logical choice was Brian Chidester. He has worked for many companies in the past two decades and, as a bonus, has a podcast as well. His podcast is called The...
info_outlineToday we sit down with Susan Kidd and Valinder Mangat and discuss FedRAMP.
Some will argue that FedRAMP is an unruly thirteen-year-old. Although FedRAMP has authorized over three hundred public service cloud providers, there is much work to be done.
For example Valinder Mangat opens the discussion by noting that we have approximately five hundred applications in the pipeline. We have a situation where manually reviewing compliance is going to be too difficult. As a result, FedRAMP is making changes. They are starting to automate the process, causing companies to become familiar with a new acronym, Open Security Controls Assessment Language, or OSCAL.
During the interview, Susan Kidd reviews her philosophy that ties into understanding OSCAL. It has been her experience that there is a limit to working hard; the best results are accomplished when one takes advantage of automation and can work smart. To that end, Susan Kidd launched something called Idea Labs, an initiative that can assist federal agencies in modernizing their automation processes using OSCAL.
Today’s compliance is not just a check box item. In the interview, Valinder Mangat details aspects of software development. There was a time when code was released and approved, like a snapshot. Today, there is a continuous improvement model in effect along with continuous testing.
The only way to accomplish that is to leverage technologies like OSCAL to keep up with changes in threat actors and best practices for handling mountains of data.
Valinder Mangat has a nice summary of this consideration: champions of innovation instead of captives of compliance. In other words, technology can be leveraged so a company does not take six months to get approved. OSCAL puts tools into the hands of federal leaders faster.
More details about the IdeaLab at DRTConfidence.
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